Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England: Agriculture in the Long Eighth Century

By Mark McKerracher

Anglo-Saxon farming has traditionally been seen as the wellspring of English agriculture, setting the pattern for 1000 years to come – but it was more important than that. A rich harvest of archaeological data is now revealing the untold story of agricultural innovation, the beginnings of a revolution, in the age of Bede. Armed with a powerful new dataset, Farming Transformed explores fundamental questions about the minutiae of early medieval farming and its wider relevance. How old were sheep left to grow, for example, and what pathologies did cattle sustain? What does wheat chaff have to do with lordship and the market economy? What connects ovens in Roman Germany with barley maltings in early medieval Northamptonshire? And just how interested were Saxon nuns in cultivating the opium poppy? Farming Transformed is the first book to draw together the variegated evidence of pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards on an extensive, regional scale. The result is an inter-disciplinary dataset of unprecedented scope and size, which reveals how cereal cultivation boomed, and new watermills, granaries and ovens were erected to cope with – and flaunt – the fat of the land. As arable farming grew at the expense of pasture, sheep and cattle came under closer management and lived longer lives, yielding more wool, dairy goods, and traction power for plowing. These and other innovations are found to be concentrated at royal, aristocratic and monastic centers, placing lordship at the forefront of agricultural innovation, and farming as the force behind kingdom-formation and economic resurgence in the seventh and eighth centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911188322

Mark McKerracher

MARK MCKERRACHER is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, where he completed his DPhil – studying Mid Saxon agriculture – in 2014. After working in museum archiving, software development and freelance archaeobotany, he is currently researching medieval farming practices as part of the ERC-funded Feeding Anglo-Saxon England project (FeedSax). His interests include archaeobotany, database development, agricultural production and Anglo-Saxon archaeology, and he writes a popular blog – The Corn Lore – which explores the science, culture, economy, history and archaeology of cereals (www.mjmckerracher.co.uk).

Book preview

Windgather Press is an imprint of Oxbow Books

Published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

© Windgather Press and Mark McKerracher 2018

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-91118-831-5

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-91118-832-2 (epub)

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

Typeset in India by Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai

For a complete list of Windgather titles, please contact:

United Kingdom

OXBOW BOOKS

Telephone [phone]

Fax [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

www.oxbowbooks.com

United States of America

OXBOW BOOKS

Telephone [phone]

Fax [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow

Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate group

Cover images: Farmland on Magdalen Hill Down, Hampshire © Mark McKerracher

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1. The lie of the land

England in the ‘long eighth century’

Rationale and scope of this study

Beating the bounds: natural environments in the study regions

2. Farm and field

Fields

Meadows

Ploughs

Farms

Conclusions

3. Beast and bone

The importance of sheep

The importance of wool

Conclusions

4. The growth of arable

Settlements and structures

Arable environments

Introducing the charred plant remains

Charred crop deposits and arable growth

Conclusions

5. The changing harvest

Wheat, barley, oat and rye

The accidental harvest

Beyond the cereals

Conclusions

6. Farming transformed

Appendix: gazetteer of sites

Bibliography

List of figures

Unless otherwise stated in caption, all maps contain OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2017

Figure 1. Location of the case study regions within Britain

Figure 2. Modern administrative composition of the case study regions

Figure 3. Topographical map of the study regions

Figure 4. Bands of chalk and limestone underlying the study regions

Figure 5. Geographical sub-regions used in this study

Figure 6. Location of sites in the Cotswolds sub-region

Figure 7. Location of sites in the Upper Thames sub-region

Figure 8. Location of sites in the Salisbury Plain sub-region

Figure 9. Location of sites in the Middle Thames sub-region

Figure 10. Location of sites in the Chilterns sub-region

Figure 11. Location of sites in the Midland Clays sub-region

Figure 12. Location of sites in the Fens sub-region

Figure 13. Changing coastline around the Wash and Fenland

Figure 14. Location of sites in the East Anglian Heights sub-region

Figure 15. Location of sites in the Breckland sub-region

Figure 16. Location of sites in the North Norfolk sub-region

Figure 17. Location of sites in the East Anglian Plain sub-region

Figure 18. Location of sites in the Suffolk Coastal Strip sub-region

Figure 19. Location of sites in the East Essex sub-region

Figure 20. Relationship between Roberts and Wrathmell’s Central Province and the study regions of this book

Figure 21. Location of key sites mentioned in the text

Figure 22. Simplified comparison of plough types

Figure 23. Changing settlement patterns over time in the Sandlings area of Suffolk

Figure 24. Map of sites with evidence for raised causeways in the study regions

Figure 25. Map of sites with paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 26. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 27. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 28. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 29. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 30. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 31. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 32. Plans of paddock and droveway complexes in the study regions

Figure 33. Details of (A) Godmanchester and (B) Gamlingay plans, showing corner entrances

Figure 34. Detail of Godmanchester plan showing possible livestock-sorting arrangement

Figure 35. Distribution of sites with faunal assemblages with at least 300 cattle, sheep and pig bones, within the study regions

Figure 36. Tripolar graph showing the relative proportions of cattle, sheep and pig bones in assemblages in the project dataset

Figure 37. Percentages of cattle bones in faunal assemblages, by period, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 38. Percentages of sheep bones in faunal assemblages, by period, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 39. Percentages of pig bones in faunal assemblages, by period, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 40. Interpolated map of the proportions of cattle bones in assemblages within the study regions, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 41. Interpolated map of the proportions of sheep bones in assemblages within the study regions, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 42. Interpolated map of the proportions of pig bones in assemblages within the study regions, excluding outliers as discussed in the text

Figure 43. Locations of Wicken Bonhunt and St Albans Abbey

Figure 44. Map of sites with mortality and/or sexing data in the project dataset

Figure 45. Sites at which cattle traction pathologies may be evident

Figure 46. Sites at which sheep ‘penning elbow’ pathologies may be evident

Figure 47. Distributions of mature herds and droveway/paddock complexes in the study regions

Figure 48. Map of sites discussed in this section

Figure 49. Plans of putative granaries

Figure 50. Comparison of Yarnton structure B 3624 with helms identified in Germany and the Netherlands

Figure 51. Detail from the plan of Yarnton, Phase 2

Figure 52. Putative crop storage and processing unit at Yarnton (eighth to ninth century)

Figure 53. Sites with pollen or sedimentary evidence discussed in the text

Figure 54. Distribution of sites with charred plant remains in the study regions

Figure 55. Schematic anatomy of the cereal plant for archaeobotanical analytical purposes

Figure 56. Simplified explanatory diagram of the processing of wheats and hulled barley

Figure 57. Highly simplified model of the cereal processing sequence, showing predicted products and by-products likely to be preserved by charring

Figure 58. Chronological distribution of sites with quorate samples

Figure 59. Chronological distribution of quorate samples

Figure 60. Geographical distribution of sites with quorate sample

Figure 61. Geographical distribution of sites with quorate samples over time

Figure 62. Average density of charred plant remains in quorate samples, grouped chronologically

Figure 63. Geographical distribution of sites with seventh- to ninth-century samples with at least 30 charred items per litre

Figure 64. Presence analysis of cereal types, among samples and sites with any charred cereal remains

Figure 65. Chronological presence analysis of wheats among sites with charred cereal remains

Figure 66. Chronological presence analysis of wheats among samples with charred cereal remains

Figure 67. Chronological presence analysis of hulled wheats among sites with charred cereal remains

Figure 68. Chronological presence analysis of hulled wheats among samples with charred cereal remains

Figure 69. Graph of samples, by period, showing percentage of hulled wheats relative to free-threshing wheats

Figure 70. Assemblage presence analysis of wheat, barley, oats and rye, by period

Figure 71. Sample presence analysis of wheat, barley, oats and rye, by period

Figure 72. Percentage of wheat grains in samples over time

Figure 73. Percentage of barley grains in samples over time

Figure 74. Percentage of rye grains in samples over time

Figure 75. Percentage of oat grains in samples over time

Figure 76. Interpolated map of percentage barley in samples

Figure 77. Interpolated map of percentage free-threshing wheat in samples

Figure 78. Interpolated map of percentage oat in samples

Figure 79. Interpolated map of percentage rye in samples

Figure 80. Selective weed presence analysis by sites

Figure 81. Selective weed presence analysis by samples

Figure 82. Map of sites mentioned in discussion of non-cereal crops

Figure 83. Comparative plans of grain ovens

List of tables

Table 1. Sheep mortality profiles from mandibular sequences in the project dataset

Table 2. Cattle mortality profiles from mandibular sequences in the project dataset

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

This book has its roots in my doctoral project ‘Agricultural Development in Mid Saxon England’, undertaken at the University of Oxford between 2010 and 2014, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My sincere thanks go to my supervisors, Professors Helena Hamerow and Amy Bogaard, who have given generously of their time and expertise throughout seven years of research, from germination to fruition and beyond. I would also like to thank the examiners of my thesis, Dr Mark Gardiner and Professor Mark Robinson, for their invaluable advice and critique.

It is a pleasure to thank the many kind people who have shared their expertise and data, and facilitated access to unpublished work, including (with sincere apologies for inadvertent omissions): Trevor Ashwin, Polydora Baker, Debby Banham, Angela Batt, Ian Baxter, Paul Booth, Sarah Botfield, Stuart Boulter, Esther Cameron, Gill Campbell, Jo Caruth, Brian Clarke, Pam Crabtree, Sally Croft, Anne Davis, Denise Druce, Brian Durham, Val Fryer, Sally Gale, Dave Gilbert, Jenny Glazebrook, Jessica Grimm, Julie Hamilton, Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, Sarah Howard, Anne-Marie McCann, Maureen Mellor, Mick Monk, John Moore, Jacqui Mulville, Peter Murphy, Andrew Newton, Leonora O’Brien, Nigel Page, Ruth Pelling, Colin Pendleton, Steve Preston, Sarah Pritchard, Dale Serjeantson, Kirsty Stonell Walker, Gabor Thomas, Karen Thomas, Fay Worley and Julia Wise.

The maps in this book have been produced using two free resources: the QGIS package (http://www.qgis.org, accessed April 2017) and Ordnance Survey Open Data made available under the Open Government Licence (https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/opendata-products.html, accessed April 2017).

Finally, I extend my warmest thanks to my close family – to Rachel, Mum and Dad – who have been hearing about ‘the book’ for far too long, and who have smiled patiently when the conversation has turned to mouldboards and manure.

CHAPTER 1

The lie of the land

Farming defined the Anglo-Saxon world. For the most part, its settlements were rural, its labours agricultural. Agrarian matters pervaded law-codes, riddles, miracle stories, educational texts and the reckoning of time. Land was measured less by physical extent than by agricultural capacity. Farming fed the wealth, war, craft and culture of Anglo-Saxon society; its heart beat to agrarian rhythms.

Despite being so central to the lives of Anglo-Saxon communities, agriculture has long been peripheral to Anglo-Saxon studies. A persistent dearth of evidence has rendered farming something of a poor relation, merely an assumed backdrop to greater social, political and economic themes. In particular, the scant evidence from written sources has long failed to provide any real narrative of agricultural change across the Anglo-Saxon period, between the fifth and eleventh centuries AD. It seems improbable that so long a span could have witnessed no development in farming practices but, until recently, any such processes have remained thoroughly obscure, as Hunter Blair observed:

‘Wherever we look – to livestock, to cereals, to root crops, to the orchard or to the kitchen garden, it is difficult to find any evidence, at least from the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period, suggesting any notable innovations in comparison with the Romano-British period.’ (Hunter Blair 1977, 272–273)

Over the last 40 years, however, and especially since 1990, the situation has been radically improved by an abundant harvest of new data. These decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth in Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology, coupled with the increasingly systematic recovery and analysis of animal bones and plant remains. The study of Anglo-Saxon agriculture no longer lies outside the realm of the archaeologist, as it did for much of the twentieth century. On the contrary, a substantial, variegated dataset is now available to the agricultural archaeologist of this period. Already these developments are bearing fruit, and recent scholarship heralds an exciting new phase of research into the early medieval countryside, with landscape and settlement research by Hamerow, Rippon and Blair; seminal work on field systems by Oosthuizen, Williamson and Hall; landmark animal bone studies by Crabtree and Holmes; and the first book-length, overarching survey of the whole topic by Banham and Faith (Hamerow 2012; Oosthuizen 2013a; Williamson 2013; Hall 2014; Crabtree 2012; Holmes 2014; Banham & Faith 2014; Rippon et al. 2015; Blair 2013b).

Nonetheless, to date only a very few studies have closely interrogated the wide-ranging and diffuse archaeological datasets that are now available, each focusing upon a specific category of evidence such as animal bones or field systems. This book is the first systematically to draw together the evidence of pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards on an extensive, regional scale, weaving together multiple strands of evidence in a view of agricultural development as a whole process. It utilises and integrates a diverse body of archaeological data for the first time, in order to tell a new story of farming transformed in Anglo-Saxon England.

Traditionally, Anglo-Saxon farming has been seen as the wellspring of English agriculture, setting the pattern for a thousand years to come – but it was more important than that. This book argues that the fields, ploughs, crops and livestock of Anglo-Saxon England were important not simply as the forerunners of later rural traditions, but as vital parts of the economies, cultures and societies of early medieval Britain. It focuses in particular on changes in farming practices between the seventh and ninth centuries. This period is already well known among historians and archaeologists as the time when Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and lordship became consolidated; when towns returned to the landscape for the first time since the Roman period, accompanied by an escalation in long-distance trade and craft production; and when monasteries proliferated, made wealthy by huge grants of land. This book argues that all of these momentous trends were underpinned and powered by fundamental transformations in farming. Anglo-Saxon England first came of age in its pastures and ploughland.

Previous studies have seen in this period the foundations of medieval English wool production and wheat cultivation. This book proposes a more complex picture of regional variation and specialisation. Cereal cultivation expanded massively as crop-choices were increasingly fine-tuned to local environmental conditions. New watermills, granaries and ovens were erected to cope with, and flaunt, the fat of the land. As arable farming grew at the expense of pasture, sheep and cattle came under closer management and lived longer lives, yielding more wool, dairy goods, and traction power for ploughing. These and other innovations were concentrated at royal, aristocratic and monastic centres, placing lordship at the forefront of agricultural innovation, and farming as the force behind kingdom-formation and economic resurgence in the age of Bede.

England in the ‘long eighth century’

My focus upon the seventh to ninth centuries follows current trends in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, recognising this as a time of major social and economic change, in agriculture as in other spheres. Historians of early medieval Europe now write of the ‘long eighth century’ – encompassing the later seventh to earlier ninth centuries – as the first recognisable period when Europe emerged from its post-Roman chrysalis in a coherent new form, newly mindful of its classical heritage but following different, post-classical trajectories (Wickham 2000, ix). North-western Europe in this period was dominated – culturally, intellectually and, in some ways, politically – by Carolingian Francia which, under Charlemagne, underwent something of a classical revival in learning and law-giving. Monastic scriptoria pursued the study and copying of ancient texts, including agronomic works, while Charlemagne’s legislation included what has been described as ‘an explicit agrarian policy’ (Butzer 1993, 558–573).

Between the seventh and ninth centuries, Anglo-Saxon England was drawn into this world: integration into European Christendom, with its rich ecclesiastical culture and fertile intellectual climate, gave rise to monastic schools of spectacular artwork and scholarship, not to mention expanding political and mercantile horizons (Webster 2012, 69–115). Later history confirms the cultural and economic impact of these centuries upon the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Certainly by the ninth and tenth centuries, for instance, the wealth of England – founded ultimately in agriculture – was sufficient to attract Viking raiders and then invaders, to buy peace from the same at hefty prices, and to support a network of fortified towns (burhs) to defend the imperilled realms (Higham & Ryan 2013, 232–322). When viewed from this perspective, it is difficult to imagine English agriculture not developing through the long eighth century.

And yet, in some ways, this is a comparatively recent view. In the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, there arose a general consensus among historians that the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period – the fifth and sixth centuries AD – had witnessed the most significant innovations in early medieval farming: namely, the introduction of heavy ploughing and open field systems, as part of an integrated Germanic package which ultimately foreshadowed medieval English farming (Whitelock 1952, 14; Hoskins 1955, 55). Such a view was consistent with the prevailing culture-historical paradigms of the time, in which the spread of ideas was correlated directly with the spread of peoples. In this model, the fifth and sixth centuries were seen as a period of major population flux, with Anglo-Saxon settlers widely – sometimes violently – displacing native Britons, and transforming the empty, wilding wastes of the post-Roman countryside into something more regular, more Germanised and, eventually, English. Largely circumstantial evidence, including the distribution of Old English place-names, was cited in support of this view. Compact ‘Anglo-Saxon’ villages and open fields were contrasted with ‘Celtic’ patterns of dispersed settlement and irregular fields (Green 1885, 138, 154; Maitland 1897, 15; Gray 1915, 409–418).

Such traditional narratives have long since been disputed, for several reasons. Not least among these reasons is the decoupling of migration from innovation in archaeological theory. The movement of ideas is no longer so readily ascribed to the spread of peoples. Besides this paradigm shift, various arguments have since been made against the traditional models of utter Germanisation in post-Roman Britain, whether genetic, cultural or agrarian (Hamerow 1997). Farming between the fifth and seventh centuries is now more commonly perceived as having undergone contraction and simplification, not wholesale innovation or restructuring.